Charles Bailey has published a very helpful bibliography (Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography, v.1), from which the resources below were gleaned. In addition, I have been adding resources to Mendeley, a research management tool: Digital Curation, Digital Library Best Practices & Guidelines, Digital Library Systems, and Metadata.

I have added a few more open source items, and a lot of proprietary systems I discovered thanks to Mr. Bailey’s rich resource. I am constructing a matrix of features for comparison, borrowing from the reports above and my initial chart, based mainly on features that are most important for our needs:

I am currently evaluating options for implementing a digital library. It’s an ongoing process. :o) Since there are probably more proprietary systems out there, I’m hoping people will leave comments letting me know about them (same thing for open source). I’ll post the charted results when I’m done (hopefully in the near future).

There are several digital asset management systems for digital libraries. On the proprietary side (closed source) there are (this is not an exhaustive list):

ContentDM (OCLC): software that handles the storage, management and delivery of library digital collections to the Web

Eloquent: A suite of applications, Librarian (ILS), Archives (software for physical archives management). Records (records management), Museum, which can be purchased individually or combined for a complete content management system (Museum+Librarian+Archives).

ICA-AtoM Project: (“International Council on Archives – Access to Memory”): a software distribution built from the Qubit Toolkit, for Archives. An online demo is available, as well as a downloadable version (update: see this site for currently supported version).

CollectionSpace: a collections management system and collection information system platform, primarily for museums. Current version is 0.6

There is also repository software, like Fedora, which can be used with a discovery interface such as Blacklight, or Islandora.

The main difference between proprietary systems and the open source systems listed above is economics. While the argument in the past has been that open source systems are not as developed and require more in-house expertise to implement, that is not the case any more. For one thing, even proprietary systems require in-house expertise in varying levels in order to realize full functionality of their features (see, e.g., Creating an Institutional Repository for State Government Digital Publications). For another, as the number of libraries implementing Digital Libraries with resource discovery have increased, development of Digital Asset Management Systems has matured beyond the Alpha, and sometimes even Beta, stage. Open source Systems which did not reach critical mass have quietly died or been absorbed into better supported products. In the proprietary field, systems typically are developed within a parent organization that includes other software, such as an Integrated Library System, whose profits support R&D for the DAM.

So, while economics should broadly encompass all aspects of implementation, including time and asset costs, in this case the economics is primarily the money involved, since the difference in the other factors has pretty much been leveled. With any system, you will be involved in user forums, in bug fix requests, in creating (or updating) documentation, in training, in local tweaking, with or without outside help. Proprietary systems are currently asking between $10,000 and $20,000 per year for a (relatively) small archive, from what I have seen and heard.

Another issue which may come up is “Cloud Computing.” Proprietary vendors (and even some open source systems) offer the option of hosting your digital library repository (where all the digital objects live) on their servers. The issue with remote hosting, of course, is control. Who has ultimate control and responsibility for the items in the repository? If the archive is intended to be open and public, the issue is more one of accountability and curation: how securely is the data being backed up, and what is/will be done to ensure long term viable access?

If the archive is intended to be for local use only (for example, on an intranet), the issues change dramatically regarding remote hosting by an outside vendor. It is no longer just a matter of secure backups, but the security of the system itself. Who can access the respository? How secure is the repository from outside crackers? With even Google admitting to a breach of their network security, how much security can be expected from a vendor?

In some cases, we may want both public and private (local) access to archive materials. While originally my thinking was to simply control access using the metadata for each object, others more experienced than I am recommend creating separate repositories for public and private archives, which adds another layer of complexity.